How was money understood in the nineteenth century? in its global context? by laborers? How did the ideation of money evolve around and through art, music, race, nation, and empire? How did the stories told about money influence people and practices? What role do myths play in comprehending money? How were relations between people mediated by narratives of money? relations between nations? This theme would invite papers and panel proposals concerning any aspect of money/myth during the long nineteenth century, including, but not limited to the “myths” or “realities” of trade, debt, industry and investment, economics, money-lending, poverty, consumer culture, class relations, race relations and their economic implications, gender politics, masculinity and femininity as shaped by/of money, sexual politics, sexuality and the law, aesthetics, art and art collecting, theater and performance politics, religion and wealth, social service programs, education, travel, entertainment, sporting, financing and producing wealth through science, international connections and compacts, public/private divide, differential health care, class mobility, marriage, widowhood, inheritance, prostitution, child rearing, infanticide, property politics, movements motivated by money (Chartism, socialism, communism, trades unions, reform), immigration, empire, war, and slavery. Equally welcome are paper and panel proposals concerning the processes of creating mythic structures around money including governmental campaigns, the publishing industry, legal processes, military campaigns, advertising, propaganda, and novelizations.

Abstracts (250 words) for 20 minute papers, author’s name and paper title in heading, with one page c.v. by September 15, 2010: Marlene Tromp, Program Chair, Denison University: nsca [at] denison [dot] edu

Presenters will be notified by December 15, 2010.

Graduate students whose proposals are accepted can at that point submit a full-length version of the paper to compete for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses. Registration and accommodation information available November 15, 2010 at http://www.english.uwosh.edu/roth/ncsa/index.html

Keynote Speaker:

Mary Poovey, Samuel Rudin University Professor of the Humanities, Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge and Department of English, New York University. Author of Genres of the Credit Economy (2008), A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (1998), Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 (1995), Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1989), and The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (1984), all with University of Chicago Press.